The Supreme Court: How Bert Beat the Bureaucrats

No one believed Inventor Bert N. Adams in 1939 when he came out of
his Queens Village, L.I., kitchen
with a battery that seemed to revolutionize the original electrical
"pile" devised by Alessandro Volta in 1796. Inventor Adams ultimately
won a U.S. patentand then the U.S. Government itself copied and
repatented his battery without paying Adams a dime. Last week the
Supreme Court not only agreed that Adams' battery met the U.S. patent
test of being new, useful and "nonobvious"; by a vote of 7 to 1, the
court also made clear...